What's the Future of Work?

Chapter 11. Don’t Replace People. Augment Them.

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“Could a machine do your job?” ask Michael Chui, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi in a recent McKinsey Quarterly article, "Where Machines Could Replace Humans and Where They Can’t Yet.” The authors try to put the current worries about this question in perspective:

As automation technologies such as machine learning and robotics play an increasingly great role in everyday life, their potential effect on the workplace has, unsurprisingly, become a major focus of research and public concern. The discussion tends toward a Manichean guessing game: which jobs will or won’t be replaced by machines?

In fact, as our research has begun to show, the story is more nuanced. While automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the next decade, it will affect portions of almost all jobs to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the type of work they entail.

Instead of the binary question of which jobs will be eliminated, the authors instead wisely point out that it is tasks that are being automated, and that automation doesn’t simply destroy jobs. It changes them.

But they don’t go far enough in their analysis. They assess the potential for job change in terms of the technical feasibility of automating various activities, the economics of labor supply and demand, and whether the savings from automation will ...